Interzone

New Science Fiction & Fantasy INTERZONE ISSUE 287 OUT NOW!

INTERZONE #286 (MAR-APR 2020)

3rd Mar, 2020

Cover

Interzone's 2020 cover artist is Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Contents

Fiction

Cofiwch Aberystwyth by Val Nolanillustrated by Richard Wagner

We passed a bloated human corpse as we entered the harbour. It was face down in the water, its clothing a tissue of rags and filth that was as much weeds as fabric. Sigrid went pale when she saw it. Annabel threw up over the side of the dinghy. I only grinned up at the drone which was filming our arrival. I knew my subscribers were going to love this shit.

Rocket Man by Louis Evansillustrated by Dave Senecal

Each night I dream of Moscow, bombsight nose cone dreams.

These dreams have no plot and no logic. The city is a plum, a windswept field, a stag’s heart. It is an emerald, a green onion, an open mouth.

And me? I am a secant. An abscess. A segment of an orange. Coal-furnace tongs. A flaw.

In the instant before I wake, sweating, heaving, I am the first gasp of the inferno.

Organ of Corti by Matt Thompsonillustrated by Martin Hanford

On our third night out from Madrid we huddled around a sputtering campfire and listened to the desert scream.

We had halted our march in the shadow of one of the lunette dunes that stretched southward from the city limits all the way to the Iberian coast. Around us, rocky outcrops rose, minaret-like, from the desert floor. These wind-scoured edifices sang dissonant harmonies into the small hours, a shrieking series of banshee wails that rose in pitch to fade beyond our perception. Ana, the leader of our little expedition, logged the time and duration of each outbreak. Her sound-level meter tracked their passage into the upper reaches of the frequency band, its readout oscillating wildly as our cochleas ached in protest.

Carriers by James Sallisillustrated by Richard Wagner

Soldiers came up the gully late that afternoon. Even to the kids who lived there – Kelly was 12 then, Eric was 16 – they looked young. And the word soldiers came to them the way most words did those days, loose and slippery so they didn’t stay around too long. The troop’s uniforms were tatters, pieced together from rags and recommissioned castoffs. The fact that they got around to this stray patch of land at all meant the government must already have won over or rounded up everyone else. In the scheme of things Kelly and Eric didn’t matter. They were stragglers, leftovers, leavings.

Black Static #74 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 74 contains new dark fiction by Matt Thompson, Christopher Kenworthy, Ainslie Hogarth, Ray Cluley, Seán Padraic Birnie, and Andrew Reichard. The cover art is by Richard Wagner, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Joachim Luetke, and others. Regular features: Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes book reviews by Mike O'Driscoll, Laura Mauro, David Surface, Philip Fracassi, Daniel Carpenter, and Andy Hedgecock who also interviews Tim Lebbon; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens. To take out a subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please click on the Shop link above or below.

Interface

Guest EditorialVal Nolan

Future Interrupted: The Eternal Act of Creation (Why We Can't Leave the Arts to Algorithms)Andy Hedgecock

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